Jo Weldon's New York School of Burlesque

The burlesque scene has its very own print magazine thanks to Dale "Black Dahlia" Rio, Shimmy Magazine's co-owner/editor and photographer (recently relocated to Seattle). She has been photographing burlesque for about five years. A little over a year ago she began editing and publishing Shimmy Magazine, the only print magazine devoted to burlesque. I know how hard it is to not only get a project like that off the ground, but to keep it going for any amount of time, and I'm thrilled to hear that Shimmy has come out in a larger format and is now being distributed in bookstores! She interviewed me for Shimmy and now...well, turnabout is foreplay. How did you get interested in publishing? I've worked on the other side of publishing, as a freelance photographer and writer, for over ten years, and when my business partner, Robin, and I decided to start shimmy, it was both of our first forays into the business side of things. it's been quite an eye-opening ex...

What is your name, and your main area of participation in burlesque? I am Don Spiro, a burlesque photographer based in New York and LA. I have been attending burlesque for ten years and photographing seriously for eight. Above: Don Spiro with Dirty Martini at the New York Burlesque Festival. Photo by Allen Lee. All other photos in this post by Don Spiro. How did you get interested in burlesque? I was always interested in it someway or another. I’m a movie fan, and I loved the films of the old vaudeville performers like the Marx Bros, Abbot and Costello, Mae West, etc…I loved the references in Bugs Bunny cartoons to Sally Rand and much preferred the Pleasure Island sequence to the rest in Pinocchio. My parents took me to Sugar Babies with Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney when I was young, I still have a garter that was tossed into the audience.I’d been with my girlfriend Augusta since high school, her grandmother was Penny Starr. Augusta did a striptease as part of her drama clas...